Posts by Liberty

15

Does Everybody turn our okay after leaving?

by Scooby in

jw
friends

i am curious... do you know some that have left the truth that become "worse" people?

for years i would hear about some who left the truth and rumours how they are on drugs, in jail, etc.

and many bros and sis would say, "you might as well go out in the world and do all the bad stuff..cuz you're dead at armaggedon!".

Liberty

Hi Scooby,

This sounds like another myth from the lie factory known as the Watch Tower Society. I think the majority of JWs leave for reasons other than wanting to become big sinners. Most exJWs got that way because they were interested in the truth and after a few years we found out that the truth was in short supply throughout Watch Tower land. The lack of real agape' love once you are fully initiated into the cult is another big reason for leaving. Perminently leaving the Society for the sole purpose of living an immoral lifestyle would be very rare I'm guessing since most people DFed simply for immorality seek reinstatement.

22

How well do you REALLY know the Organisation?

by gumby in

jw
friends

many times a new one will post a question to what the witnesess teach on a matter or will simply make a statement.

many times you have to wonder where they get their ideas from as regards to what the society teaches on a matter.

many times they are simply wrong, or have the understanding twisted.

Liberty

Much of the aimlessness, confusion, and lack of doctrinal clarity among JWs in the last 15 years or so could probably be explained by the death of Fred Franz. Fred Franz was the man responsible for almost everything JWs have believed since the 1930's. F. Franz was Rutherford's right hand man and continued as the Watch Tower Society's main "scholar/prophet" after Rutherford's death and into the early 1990's when old age and finally death cut off the flow of his powerful influence. Since his death no one left in power has been able to match his creative biblical "mental gymnastics" nor speak with his same authority, an authority/confidence born of F. Franz's conviction that the mantel of Christ's authority over the Organization was passed directly from Russel to Rutherford to F. Franz and Knorr. The witch hunts of the early 1980's wiped out any creative/intelligent Watch Tower staffers who could have filled the void left by F. Franz's death. Ray Franz and other "liberals" on the writing staff such as Ed Dunlap and Lyman Swingle could have made a much smoother transition and kept the Society vibrant after F. Fran's death. I belief that Fred Franz himself was so convinced that Armageddon would arrive before his death that he allowed/encouraged the shake up leaving him as the sole "intellectual" force & unquestioned authority at the center of the Society's power. The Watch Tower Society is now feeling the effects of this purge in its meandering repeats of F. Fran's "old light".

172

Evolution or Creation??

by dottie in

well i know i may be opening a can of worms here.... but after what we were taught in the wts about creation...and now that you may know more about evolution... which do you think you'd choose to believe more??.

myself...i am leaning towards evolution...but then i read things that make me think otherwise.

so i do find it confusing sometimes .

Liberty

Hooberus,

I fear you are making a real effort to cloud the debate rather than just having trouble understanding our points. We know that tadpoles turning to frogs or embryonic developments are not examples of macro-evolution. These are clear examples however, of evolutionary principles we can see in our everyday lives as oppossed to Creationist principles which have NO illustration what-so-ever in our dailey experiences. You should ask yourself honestly; why would a God who uses direct creation make land animals, toads for example, which start out life as little fishes in water and then change into air breathing land animals?

Whales are another good example of an illogical direct creation. What is the point of creating an air breathing, warm blooded animal which is destined to live out its whole life in the deep ocean when fish have proven to be a far more effecient design for such an environment? It makes far more sense that whales still breathe air and are warm blooded because they evolved from land mammals in an irratic environment rather than that God designed them to be ineffecient in the first place. You are muddying the debate waters with your straw man arguments about the details of micro vs macro evolution. The evidence is clear that creation by invisible spirit beings is the most unlikely possibility for the diversity of life we see on the Earth. You have presented NO evidence at all for such an extraordinary claim, let alone the extraordinary evidence which would be required for reasonable people to believe in such a far fetched and improbable theory. The details of evolution are open to question and our knowledge of all its mechanisms remains incomplete yet it still fits all the evidence we have available far better than direct creation by invisible super beings in the recent past. I could claim that giant pink cotton candy beings created the Universe as a carnival ride but few people would believe me unless this incrediable claim could be proven with some extraordinary evidence. If not for our cultural ties to Christianity your creation by invisible God theories would sound just as silly.

172

Evolution or Creation??

by dottie in

well i know i may be opening a can of worms here.... but after what we were taught in the wts about creation...and now that you may know more about evolution... which do you think you'd choose to believe more??.

myself...i am leaning towards evolution...but then i read things that make me think otherwise.

so i do find it confusing sometimes .

Liberty

Hooberus,

The fact that you can't see the difference between finding ancient artifacts which are logically atributable to human manufacture and comparing this to finding ancient artifacts which are claimed to be made by invisible spirit entities speaks volumes for your state of mind. If I discover an ancient ceramic art piece but can't document that it was made by a specific potter, Ogg the clay worker whose name was lost to history, I don't automatically assume that it, therefore, must have been made by invisible super beings. Human potters today make very similar objects to ancient ceramic items, some ancient pots even retain human fingerprints, we know ancient cultures used them from the evidence found in other works of art or from the fact that such artifacts litter old dwelling sites so even if we can't prove who specifically made the items we conclude from our evidence and known experience that such ancient items are most likely of human manufacture. A three thousand year old truck found in the future would easily fall into this same category.

The fact that you didn't grasp the meaning of my tadpole to frog example as proof that life forms can and do change from one form to another also illustrates your inability to grasp the most basic modern biological concepts. If we have no evidence for invisible super beings creating the diversity of life on this planet it is perfectly logical to draw a different conclusion from observing changes easily seen in nature such as water breathing gilled,finned, fish-like beings changing into limbed air breathers like frogs or human embryos. If we were a direct creation by God surely He would not go to all the trouble of having us follow such a complex development which looks mysteriously close to a pattern predicted by an evolutionary explaination. We believe evolution to be a more probable explaination for the life forms we see on our planet today rather than direct creation by invisible spirit beings because of the evidence and experiences we bring to the problem. In short, we have NO evidence or experience with creation by invisible beings so we consider this an unlikely means for populating a planet in the same way that since pottery does not normally appear from thin air we do not consider them to be the creations of unseen spirit beings.

172

Evolution or Creation??

by dottie in

well i know i may be opening a can of worms here.... but after what we were taught in the wts about creation...and now that you may know more about evolution... which do you think you'd choose to believe more??.

myself...i am leaning towards evolution...but then i read things that make me think otherwise.

so i do find it confusing sometimes .

Liberty

Poor Hooberus,

Your automobile analogy is greatly flawed. It CAN easily be proven that a vehicle was made in a real physical factory by real physical people so it requires no faith to believe it. My car analogy from an earlier post is far more applicable to God when I stated that claiming Henry Ford's ghost made my car CANNOT be proven and therefore would require faith. We have a world of experience which tells us cars are made by physical makers in the realm of reality but we have little experiential evidence of cars being made by supernatural entities from an invisible realm. To claim that a car was built by a well known automobile company is not an extraordinary claim, while claiming a car was built by ghosts IS a very extraordinary thing, The first claim is easy to believe while the other claim is very hard to believe since there is no experience or evidence of such an extraordinary thing. Evolution is a much more believable method for the creation of the diverse life forms we see in the world today than Bible based Divine Creation. There is a lot of evidence for natural forces working to change life forms and our dailey experiences are full of such evidence. Tadpoles become frogs, fish-like limbless human embryos suspended in liquid change gradually into air breathing limbed land animals, yet no where do we see animals being created by invisible beings out of thin air. There is NO comparison between faith in God and science working out the details of natural evolutionary processes. An invisible, inactive, silent spirit being cannot be studied by any known science, the natural world can be studied, patterns observed, and evidence gathered. Evolution occurs in the natural world, it can be observed and studied here and now and through fossil evidence from the past.

22

My Investigation Begins..........

by sandy in

well everyone thanks to many of your comments and urgings i started my investigation to find the "truth" about the wtbts.

today, i wrote two letters to the united nations and i finally ordered crisis of conscience.

if any of you have any more suggestions or comments please reply.. .

Liberty

Hi Sandy,

May your search for truth be fruitful. I don't see how you can go wrong by getting more information. If the Watch Tower Society is really who they claim to be then your search will prove they have the Truth. If you find in your research that they are false then you have gained a great gift in knowing that they are exploiting their followers and that you can free yourself from this exploitation. Either way, if there is a God, He would approve of your honest questioning of those who use/abuse His authority. It is difficult for a person to reexamine their beliefs, let alone change them. It takes a brave and honest person to admit that they may have been fooled.

Many things caused me to doubt the Watch Tower Society. One thing which seems very clear are all of their false predictions. I'm a JW from long ago so I didn't need to research this aspect of their less than truthful approach to date setting. I was around during the late 60's and through the 1970's and saw first hand not only that they were wrong about Armageddon's time frame but that then they proceeded to waffel and finally lie about their false predictions after they saw this date receed into history. This alone proves they have no "spirit direction from God" to help them understand Bible prophesy. They are just another religion cashing in on the fear of Armageddon

2

1917 News

by Sargon in

.

just to let everyone know.

the last survivor of the battle for vimy ridge died yesterday at the age of 103. there are now only 19 canadian veterans left from the first world war.. the only significance in pointing this out is how close at hand the end of the 1914 generation actually is.

Liberty

Hi Sargon,

This is an interesting item since even babies born around 1914 are almost extinct by now. This teaching is discredited all the more by realizing that babies are never thought of as part of a "generation" in any general time frame. The 60's generation, for example, were never understood to be the babies born in this era but rather the adults who were the movers and shakers of the time. At the very least, an influential person is usually in their mid 20's before they can have any impact upon the mores of their generation and many are in their 30's,40's, and 50's if we think of politicians, business leaders, and military officers having a real impact on their contemporary society, especially so in 1914. The reality of how silly the Watch Tower Society's excuses are sinks in when we realize that a 40 year old in 1914 would be 66 by 1940, a very average age of death for that time. In short, even the longest lived survivors of the 1914 Generation died out at least 40 years ago. Keep in mind too that the WTS never said "when the tiny number of 100+ year old survivors finally all die the end will come" they said "before the 1914 Generation passes away Armageddon will have begun.". This generation doctrine was "modified" in 1995 because even gullible JWs found it too hard to hold on to in its original form. It is now thoroughly discredited and joins the many other false predictions from the Watch Tower leadership on the scrap heap of history.

30

Cain and Abel..... why the disagreements?

by anti-absolutism in

jw
friends

when i was quite young, (about 8 years old) and i was told about the abel being favoured by god, cain getting jealous and killing abel story, i couldn't help but wonder why god was so hard on cain.

i am certainly not condoning cain killing his brother, but since god made both the animals that abel was offering and the veggies that cain was offering, why was cain looked down on?.

also, why did it seem better to god to kill an animal that abel offered, as opposed to thinking, well at least cain is only wasting some food.

Liberty

Hi Neonmadman,

You are right, Cain being murdered is not in the modern Bible. It's been so long since I researched the Cain and Able story that I got a Rabbinical tradition mixed up with the Cannonized Bible books. So since it's just a Jewish tradition and not in the Bible I'll pull this argument from the table and admit I made an error. However, my other questions are valid and I have seen no good refutations of them so far. How can one be cursed to wander and at the same time found a city? Who populated this city since Cain was a wanderer far from the only humans, Adam, Eve, and their other children? Who was Cain afraid of that might kill him since God could easily tell his family, the world's only humans, to leave him alone and he wandered away from them?

172

Evolution or Creation??

by dottie in

well i know i may be opening a can of worms here.... but after what we were taught in the wts about creation...and now that you may know more about evolution... which do you think you'd choose to believe more??.

myself...i am leaning towards evolution...but then i read things that make me think otherwise.

so i do find it confusing sometimes .

Liberty

Hi Dottie,

I think your confusion is caused by a lack of information. We can't all be experts on everything so we must decide for ourselves that which we must research ourselves and that which we trust others to research for us. As an ex-JW I was obsessed with the truth of our natural history so I was driven to research evolution specifically and science in general since I no longer trusted the "research" done on these subjects by the Watch Tower Society who are proven liars. If you are bothered by your doubts I strongly suggest taking University level classes in the sciences, especially Geology, Biology, and Paleontology. This is a huge investment in time and money but for me it has been worth it for the peace of mind which has resulted from knowing first hand the whys, hows, and whats of real science. Another alternative is to read a lot of books on the subject but without teachers to help you this will be more difficult but less expensive. The best science books for laymen I know were written by Carl Sagan and, as someone has already mentioned, Stephen Gould. These books are not substitutes for a University education but will help a person to understand the basic scientific methods employed by researchers in these fields along with the evidence these methods provide. This way you can weigh the evidence for yourself and not depend on some one else's interpretations and conclusions. The more research you do on your own the more convincing the evidence will become.

An honest search for the truth has revealed to me mountains of evidence which proves that the WTS doesn't have a clue about the Earth's history and that the Bible cannot be the inspired word of God because it is filled with falsehood and contradictions. If God exists He could not be the inspiration behind a book which can be refuted at every turn by the very evidence He created all around us in the natural Universe. Science is all about making observations and gathering evidence in the natural Universe. Science does not address issues of the supernatural such as the existance of invisible super beings in the spirit realm or their role in creating the Universe. Natural forces which can be observed are studied and the Bible presents events which were supposed to have occured in the physical natural realm so these can be observed, evidence gathered and conclusions drawn. All the physical evidence so far gathered proves that the Bible does not accurately describe the development of the Universe, the Earth, nor the life forms found upon it. Such fanciful biblical events as a Global Flood or the Tower of Babel stories are just not possible given the evidence available. In short, the Bible is thoroughly discredited as a literal historical record and as the inspired word of God since He would logically not inspire lies which are discredited by His own creations.

6

What about the $$$$

by sandy in

i keep reading some of your posts and many of you make metion of the wtbts making billions of dollars.

can any of you elaborate on this?

and where can i find the information myself?.

Liberty

Hi Sandy,

I'm no accountant nor do I have secret info sources but I can do simple math. The Society produces millions and millions of various publications in volunteer labor factories they own tax free where the raw materials are purchased in huge bulk at huge discounts. By the time a piece of literature reaches a JW for distribution it has only cost the WTS a few cents. The JWs then purchase large amounts of this material for their own use and for their free labor distribution to the public. The Society has already made a huge profit at this point because they charge more than a few cents per item which at this point could all go in the trash, but wait there is more. Many JWs take donations from the "householders" they give literature to and many of these JWs give the Society back the entire donation in essence doubling the huge profit they had to begin with. Experts in the printing business have calculated the costs they know in order to produce profits from unionized paid workers/distributors in taxable businesses with shareholders to answer to so I think the WTS makes plenty even if their products are 1/4 of the price charged at Kingdom Hall literature counters compared to for-profit literature prices. This doesn't even include straight donations given to the Society with no literature exchange involved. Just the real estate and buildings owned by the WTS is proof of the immense wealth they control.